But in Orlando it will not go down as the 15th NBA title the Lakers will have won; it will go down as the championship -- that elusive first championship -- the Magic will have lost.

The Lakers now hold a 3-1 series lead -- an advantage that has never been lost in NBA Finals history. But the Magic could easily have had a 3-1 lead if Dwight Howard had made a free throw at the end of Game 4 and Courtney Lee had made an alley-oop layup in Game 2. Those two misses illustrate the fine line between winning and losing.

Magic coach Stan Van Gundy, too, has walked a fine line -- a line between the mad-scientist coach concocting brilliantly unconventional lineups and the simply maddening coach making bafflingly inexplicable decisions.

Van Gundy has wrongly blamed himself after many Magic losses during the course of his two-year tenure, but Game 4 Thursday was a situation where he could have rightly blamed himself -- but didn't.

Case in point: His controversial Game 4 decision not to foul the Lakers before Derek Fisher hit his game-tying three-pointer with 4.6 seconds left in regulation. My rule of thumb is this: You can't make a three if you don't take a three. Isn't it better to let Fisher attempt two free throws and still be up by at least one with a few seconds left than to let one of the game's great clutch shooters hit a game-tying three?

Admittedly, there are two schools of thought on this; I'm just a little fuzzy on which school Van Gundy attends. He claims in hindsight that he regrets the decision not to foul and that it will "haunt him forever." But in the next breath he stubbornly says he would make the exact same strategic move again.

For fans, the most exasperating example of Van Gundy's inconsistency has come with his decision to bring back point guard Jameer Nelson for the Finals.

In Game 1 of the Finals, Nelson played nearly as many minutes in a reserve role as starter Rafer Alston. Alston was clearly unhappy and Van Gundy admitted it was a mistake to have played Nelson so extensively. Van Gundy claimed during his Game 1 mea culpa that Nelson wasn't in good enough condition to have played so many minutes.

Well, guess what? In Game 4, Nelson played even more minutes than he did in Game 1 and Alston sat out the entire fourth quarter and overtime. So are we supposed to believe Nelson, in the span of a week, suddenly got himself into great condition?